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Monday, November 17, 2014

'I think I'm going to have it,'
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
'Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.'
A judgement the years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first, particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but a part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

4 comments:

This is beautiful. My mum quoted lines from this poem in a letter she put into a box with a shawl she made on my wedding day. She came in first thing in the morning of the wedding day with a two cups of tea, the box containing the shawl and the letter containing the lines.

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'Blindfold me and read out the Facebook statuses of my friends, without their names, and I will tell you which are American and which are British. Americans post links to inspirational stories and parenting blogs packed with life lessons. (British parenting blogs tend to be packed with despair and feces.) ' Ruth Whippman, America the Anxious